Designing Software Product Lines with UML: From Use Cases to Pattern-Based Software Architectures

Description

"Designing Software Product Lines with UML is well-written, informative, and addresses a very important topic. It is a valuable contribution to the literature in this area, and offers practical guidance for software architects and engineers."
—Alan Brown
Distinguished Engineer, Rational Software, IBM Software Group

"Gomaa's process and UML extensions allow development teams to focus on feature-oriented development and provide a basis for improving the level of reuse across multiple software development efforts. This book will be valuable to any software development professional who needs to manage across projects and wants to focus on creating software that is consistent, reusable, and modular in nature."
—Jeffrey S Hammond
Group Marketing Manager, Rational Software, IBM Software Group

"This book brings together a good range of concepts for understanding software product lines and provides an organized method for developing product lines using object-oriented techniques with the UML. Once again, Hassan has done an excellent job in balancing the needs of both experienced and novice software engineers."
—Robert G. Pettit IV, Ph.D.
Adjunct Professor of Software Engineering, George Mason University

"This breakthrough book provides a comprehensive step-by-step approach on how to develop software product lines, which is of great strategic benefit to industry. The development of software product lines enables significant reuse of software architectures. Practitioners will benefit from the well-defined PLUS process and rich case studies."
—Hurley V. Blankenship II
Program Manager, Justice and Public Safety, Science Applications International Corporation

"The Product Line UML based Software engineering (PLUS) is leading edge. With the author's wide experience and deep knowledge, PLUS is well harmonized with architectural and design pattern technologies."
—Michael Shin
Assistant Professor, Texas Tech University

Long a standard practice in traditional manufacturing, the concept of product lines is quickly earning recognition in the software industry. A software product line is a family of systems that shares a common set of core technical assets with preplanned extensions and variations to address the needs of specific customers or market segments. When skillfully implemented, a product line strategy can yield enormous gains in productivity, quality, and time-to-market. Studies indicate that if three or more systems with a degree of common functionality are to be developed, a product-line approach is significantly more cost-effective.

To model and design families of systems, the analysis and design concepts for single product systems need to be extended to support product lines. Designing Software Product Lines with UML shows how to employ the latest version of the industry-standard Unified Modeling Language (UML 2.0) to reuse software requirements and architectures rather than starting the development of each new system from scratch. Through real-world case studies, the book illustrates the fundamental concepts and technologies used in the design and implementation of software product lines.

This book describes a new UML-based software design method for product lines called PLUS (Product Line UML-based Software engineering). PLUS provides a set of concepts and techniques to extend UML-based design methods and processes for single systems in a new dimension to address software product lines. Using PLUS, the objective is to explicitly model the commonality and variability in a software product line.

Hassan Gomaa explores how each of the UML modeling views—use case, static, state machine, and interaction modeling—can be extended to address software product families. He also discusses how software architectural patterns can be used to develop a reusable component-based architecture for a product line and how to express this architecture as a UML platform-independent model that can then be mapped to a platform-specific model.

Key topics include:

• Software product line engineering process, which extends the Unified Development Software Process to address software product lines
• Use case modeling, including modeling the common and variable functionality of a product line
• Incorporating feature modeling into UML for modeling common, optional, and alternative product line features
• Static modeling, including modeling the boundary of the product line and information-intensive entity classes
• Dynamic modeling, including using interaction modeling to address use-case variability
• State machines for modeling state-dependent variability
• Modeling class variability using inheritance and parameterization
• Software architectural patterns for product lines
• Component-based distributed design using the new UML 2.0 capability for modeling components, connectors, ports, and provided and required interfaces
• Detailed case studies giving a step-by-step solution to real-world product line problems

Designing Software Product Lines with UML is an invaluable resource for all designers and developers in this growing field. The information, technology, and case studies presented here show how to harness the promise of software product lines and the practicality of the UML to take software design, quality, and efficiency to the next level. An enhanced online index allows readers to quickly and easily search the entire text for specific topics.

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Developing Software Lines: Why Bother?

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Table of Contents

Foreword.

Preface.

Acknowledgments.

Software Reuse.

Software Product Lines.

Modeling Requirements Variability in Software Product Lines: Feature Modeling.

Modeling Design Variability in Software Product Lines.

Reusable Design Patterns.

Modeling Single Systems with UML.

COMET: A UML-Based Software Design Method for Single Systems.

Modeling Software Product Lines with UML.

UML as a Standard.

Related Texts.

Summary.

Object-Oriented Concepts.

Information Hiding.

Relationships between Classes.

Dynamic Modeling.

Sequential and Concurrent Applications.

Software Architecture and Components.

Summary.

3. Software Product Line Engineering.

Evolutionary Software Product Line Engineering Process.

Software Product Line Engineering Phases.

Forward and Reverse Evolutionary Engineering.

Integration of PLUS with the Spiral Model.

Integration of PLUS with Unified Software Development Process.

Requirements, Analysis, and Design Modeling in Software Product Lines.

Software Product Line Scoping.

Summary.

4. Use Case Modeling for Software Product Lines.

The Use Case Model in Single Systems.

The Use Case Model for Software Product Lines.

Identifying Use Cases.

Documenting Product Line Use Cases.

Example of a Use Case Description.

Modeling Variability in Use Cases.

Modeling Small Variations.

Modeling Variability with the Extend Relationship.

Modeling Variability with the Include Relationship.

Use Case Development Strategies.

Summary.

5. Feature Modeling for Software Product Lines.

Introduction to Feature Analysis.

Commonality/Variability Feature Analysis.

Features and Use Cases.

Feature Modeling with UML.

Feature Groups.

Advanced Feature Modeling with UML.

Summary.

6. Static Modeling in Software Product Lines.

Modeling Commonality and Variability in Product Lines.

Static Modeling of the Software Product Line Problem Domain.

Static Modeling of the Software Product Line Scope.

Static Modeling of Entity Classes.

Modeling Application Classes and Objects.

Summary.

7. Dynamic Interaction Modeling for Software Product Lines.

Dynamic Modeling in Single Systems.

Evolutionary Dynamic Modeling in Software Product Lines.

Kernel First Approach.

Software Product Line Evolution Approach.

Message Sequence Numbering on Interaction Diagrams.

Example of Evolutionary Dynamic Analysis for the Microwave Oven Product Line.

Summary.

8. Finite State Machines and Statecharts for Software Product Lines.

Finite State Machines for Kernel and Single Systems.

Hierarchical Statecharts.

Finite State Machines and Statecharts for Software Product Lines.

Inherited State Machines in Software Product Lines.

Parameterized State Machines in Software Product Lines.

Comparison of Approaches.

Kernel First Approach: State-Dependent Dynamic Analysis.

Software Product Line Evolution Approach.

Dynamic Analysis with Communi

Foreword

This is a book about software product lines (known in Europe as software product families), which are families of software systems that have some commonality and some variability. The goal of developing software product lines is software reuse-from reuse of software requirements through reuse of software code. The promise of large scale software reuse has been a goal of the software industry since the dawn of software engineering in the late sixties. However, it has proved an elusive goal.

Software reuse is a subject that most of the larger corporations are facing. To reuse software is to improve productivity (less new software has to be built) and quality (presumably the existing software has been tested and errors have been corrected). Various technologies have been proclaimed as the solution to the software reuse problem, from subroutines to modular software to object-oriented programming to component-based programming. Each of these technologies made a contribution but the overall result in general has been much less than hoped. A major problem with these technologies is that the emphasis is on code reuse. Numerous studies have indicated that coding is only around 20% of the total cost of software development; hence improvements in coding will only be of limited value. Much greater payoff is likely from reuse of software requirements and architectures, which is the goal of software product lines.

I have long been an advocate of large scale software reuse. In a book I wrote together with Martin Griss and Patrik Jonsson on product line engineering in 1997, we addressed architecture, process and organization for software reuse. Product line engineering is about reuse of all artifacts, such as software requirements, analysis, designs including architectures, and test-not just code reuse.

Hassan Gomaa's book is taking a step forward. In particular, he follows the distinction between use cases and features made by Martin Griss in a 1998 paper: use cases are user oriented, with the objective of determining the functional requirements of the product line, whereas features are reuser oriented with the objective of organizing the results of a product line commonality and variability analysis. Following this distinction, Gomaa describes how features can be determined from the product line use case model, by analyzing kernel, optional, and alternative use cases, as well as use case variation points. He uses this analysis as a basis for describing product line commonality by means of common features, and product line variability by means of optional and alternative features, as well as feature groups that constrain how related features can be used by a product line member.

The book also describes how software architectural patterns for product lines can be used as a starting point for developing a reusable software architecture. In addition, it describes how commonality and variability can be modeled in component-based software architectures using the new UML 2.0 notation for composite structure diagrams.

Hassan clearly has a command of how to tie feature-based analysis and use case analysis together. I feel that this is the strongest part of the work, and is an area that is sorely lacking in most UML treatments.

Ivar Jacobson
April 2004

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